ABOUT

Hey there and welcome to my site! My name is Serena Readhead.

As a new teacher I found myself often wondering if my teaching strategies were the best for my students.  While my students made steady progress in these early years, I felt like I was floundering, trying out new instructional practices that claimed to be research-based, only to discover as I dug a little deeper into the methods that the research was flimsy at best. It became more of a trial and error search that occasionally produced some real gems, but also sometimes felt like a frustrating waste of time.  

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In my fourth year of teaching, a speech and language pathologist shared a book, The Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, and this changed everything.  It opened my eyes (and my brain) to the wonderful, well-researched world of evidence-based educational practices.  After reading this book, I became passionate about implementing well-researched teaching practices in my classroom (so much so that I went on to earn an MA in Education in 2022).  My students went from steady progress to soaring. 

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After receiving my MA in Education, I moved into a part-time role in a Title One school supporting struggling readers.  This has allowed me time and flexibility to continue to read and research best practices for elementary teachers and interventionists.  

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Teaching is time consuming. We teachers wear many hats and carry many responsibilities. When in the classroom fulltime, all my time was consumed with creating a positive classroom environment, lesson planning, implementation, building relationships with students and families, and grading, to say nothing of faculty and staff meetings. I hardly had time to comb through academic journals, books, papers, and studies to find research-based interventions and teaching practices.  This is why I began this blog.  I hope to condense the research, to translate it into relatable, actionable content that busy teachers can apply to their classrooms right away.  And through this application, I hope we see all students soar.